I have been quite absent lately because I have been busy with wedding related stuffs as well as my new house renovation. I would like to talk about house renovation in this post. It's gona be a long post so if only you are going to renovate your house at this moment, please read ahead for tips from an experienced person haha...Otherwise, please skip to the next post. But man, I tell you, house renovation can really take up your time! And because of running up and down due to the house, I am a bit lagging in the wedding planning department.
Now that it is nearing to the wedding, I think we kinda concluded that morale of the story is: Don't furnish a house and plan a wedding at the same time *laughs* unless of course, one of you has a flexible working time and both of you co-operate and do things together and be really into it together. I am very grateful for my partner who is with me 100% into this house renovation making it all the more fun and exciting! We literally handpicked each and every item in our house up to the washroom bidet (lol!) and it felt so personalised! You and your partner need to be a team in this and there bound to be differences but you have to meet halfway because if you are not a team, your house will crumble. Decisions need to be made and it needs to be made fast sometimes like how I will explain below on how we took a decision to stop our first contractor.
Now, first thing's first:
1. SET AN EXPECTED MOVE IN DATE
Timeline was very important to us. We were working around the clock to get the house completed because we were expected to move in just before our wedding date. Set a timeline and work backwards. But please be realistic. As we all know, contractors tend to delay renovation so set a comfortable timeline so that you will not rush or stress up due to the house. Our minimum timeline was 3 months to complete but our house took 6 months to finally complete to move in. There was a 3 months delay which I will elaborate further below. Luckily, our maximum timeline was 6 months so we were still able to work around that albeit still a bit of rush due to wedding related stuffs.
2. FIX A BUDGET AND WORK WITHIN THAT BUDGET
Yes, fixing a budget is the utmost priority. And I'm not just talking about a lump sum budget. You can set a budget at RM100k but still wouldn't know how to work within it. What I meant was set a budget for each and every household item you would like to purchase and work within that. For example:
1. Kitchen Cabinet- RM7k
2. Walk in wardrobe- RM10k
3. Sofa- RM3k
You don't want to overspend on unnecessary items and regretting it later on. By fixing a budget, you will eventually know how to work around it making it cost effective. Let's say, if you find a nice sofa and it costs you RM5k although it was on sale. Don't be cheated on 'SALE' items. But because you have fixed a budget on the sofa at RM3k, you will eventually try harder to find for a similar sofa within RM3k. It's actually all about effort. It's time versus cost. We spent all our last 6 months' weekends on house mostly. We were comparing prices and visiting one home expos to another home expos just to bargain and get a good price for each household item as we have a budget to adhere to. Luckily, due to proper planning, we were able to do up the house below our budget which was an absolute good news for us. We didn't compromise on quality and I will show you how you can get good quality products without burning a hole in your pocket.
3. IMAGINE HOW YOUR HOUSE WILL LOOK LIKE
You must have proper planning on roughly how you want your house to look like. You don't want to go into shops and waste time looking around not knowing what to buy. I always believe in this: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So planning is super important. Unless of course you have extra cash to pay an interior designer to do all the work for you then you don't have to read further hehe because this post is to help you save cost. We did all our 'interior designing' ourselves. We actually took out the drawings from the developer's sale and purchase agreement, photostated it, caculated the measurements, scribbled how we wanted it, re-drew it using powerpoint and agreed on how we wanted the house to look like before proceeding to get quotes from contractors. You don't want to be meeting the contractors and asking them, 'How ah? Any suggestions?' Nope. Big mistake. They will just introduce expensive stuffs to you and cut throat you. Bring your drawings or ideas and show them what you want. Then negotiate on each item of the house to be cost effective.
You can do the following on how to get ideas if you are literally starting from blank like we did:
a) Screenshot certain items you like from Google or Pinterest and start from there. I had a whole photo album of screenshots from Google
b) Go to show house units by Developers to get some rough ideas. We went to so many and took some pictures as reference
I love the glass jewellery box for the dressing table and got a similar one for ourselves.
c) Go to Ikea because Ikea showcases certain living hall, kitchen and wardrobe ideas which you can make your own later
4. GET QUOTES FROM A FEW CONTRACTORS
Now that you got your budget intact and imagine how your house will look like, then it's time to put all those things into action.
Get some contractors to give you a quote base on what you want. Now, I have mentioned above to list down your budget for each and every item. Get the quote from your contractor on each and every item as well. We specifically told the contractors to not quote us on a lump sum basis but on a per item basis so that if one contractor quotes higher on a certain item, we will just sub it out to a different contractor. As I said, time versus cost. If you have a budget to adhere to, you need to spend time laying all these out, comparing prices and get the best for your house. Since it is our pet project, we didn't mind doing all these ourselves. After meeting up with at least 4 contractors and got each quotes, we picked our contractor and decided to go with him.
5. MONITORING
We have gotten the preliminaries sorted out. Now comes the real work. Don't be fooled into thinking, this is the easy part. Once you have hired your contractor, people think they can shake leg and just wait for it to be done. No. That is soo wrong! Luckily, I am the type that likes to have an update on everything that is related to my work. So, monitoring their work was important. Firstly, sometimes the worker knows what to do but how they do it can be different. So, when you are present to monitor them, they can ask you face to face and you can straight away answer rather than 3 months down the road and you see that it is not how you wanted it to be done. We monitor them on a weekly basis. And also because of the monitoring, we found out that the contractor we hired wasn't up to par unfortunately. We were quite unhappy due to the delays and we decided to stop him in the final stages of the work and took the last part up ourselves. Sometimes, things like that happen. I never thought it would happen to me due to the sweet words and promises by the contractor but it happened. And when it happens, you need to act fast. You need to start your next action plan on what to do next if your contractor is not performing. You cannot waste time and sit back and just complain.
Then monitoring your main contractor is one thing, monitoring your installers is another. Since we bought air conditioners, did our walk in wardrobe, kitchen cabinet, autogate etc etc etc, we had to monitor each and every one of those installers.
Water heater was one guy.
Autogate another guy.
Air cond another guy
And each and every one of them would not come at the same time. So now you see, how much you need to plan your time in doing the house? Haha
6. BE PREPARED FOR THE WORST
I mean of course don't jinx it but let's be practical. Not every plan can be perfect. But always always have a plan B. You know what's the worst that happened to our house? One fine day, I opened the door and found my whole house flooded due to a leak in one of the pipes. Imagine my horror!
Can you see the water mark and the water flowing?
It was like a freaking waterfall in my house >.<
You cannot see it but the house was filled with water and there were electrical stuffs, contractors stuffs all on the floor. It was a mess! At that point, I was so upset. But, oh well, life has to go on. We repaired it, cleared the house and continued the renovation. Luckily, it was before we moved in so that was a blessing in disguise.
7. BUY YOUR OWN SMALL ITEMS
While your contractor is doing the major part of your house, you can also do your part by hunting for the small items in your house, We took the initiative to literally handpick all the fans, lightings etc of the house. We did not ask the contractor to buy and took it upon ourselves because we found a cheap place to buy them.
You can check out:
1. Houses Lightings (Puchong) for fans and lights. [They are really cheap and it's like pasar malam on weekends lol]
2. One Living Sdn Bhd (Taman Sri Muda) for water heater, fridge, washer, dryer and aircond [Among TBM, Harvey Norman, and other shops, we found here the cheapest]
3. CSM hardware for paint, pipings and they sell so many other stuffs
4. Mr DIY for any miscellaneous stuffs [They really are cheap and of good quality]
5. IKEA for good long lasting furnitures which are reasonably priced IMO
-Ikea my second home-
6. Home expos for manufacturers' price. If you find a manufacturer selling furniture items, it will be cheaper than outside. And so happened, we bought it during the 'No GST, no SST period' so we were lucky.
7. LAZADA for cheaper accessories [If you're lucky, some good dealers sell really good quality products below market price]
8. Kaodim.com for any types of services which is very reliable
Yes, we literally stopped by each and every place to pick out our stuffs for the house. Hence, why I said, having a flexible working time is important. It so happened that I quit my previous job and it all came at the right time.
8. DO NOT RELY ON OTHERS TOO MUCH
You would think that after paying so much to hire people, just let them do their job. Wrong. This is also something I learnt in the working world especially when you are your own boss. When things don't get done, you have to get your hands dirty and I have no qualms in doing that. Same in the working world, when my clerk is not performing, I am not just going to lay back but I will take it up and finish the job myself and then a performance review on that clerk.
So since we fired our first contractor, we had to take up certain paintings ourselves lol
See sometimes, the only people you can rely on is yourself. Of course we hired additional help but after that, we were super hands on.
My husband did most of the furnitures with just a little help from me hehe
And then we bought some more from Ikea.
Did you know Ikea has sought Thelorry.com services where they can send your stuffs on the same day AND assemble your furniture also on the same day? We were happy to hear that and took up that offer.
The people were also dedicated because although they came quite late(also because we finished shopping late) they assembled our furnitures until 3am in the morning!! I had no qualms waiting as long as it gets done haha. We were too tired already. We assembled the smaller stuffs while the bigger ones, we let the professionals do haha
9. MOVING IN
Now that every major renovation work is done, it's time to move in! Another headache is to find a good mover. I found mine from Kaodim.com. Remember to only bring what is necessary haha. And I relied a lot on my current house's 'donations' hahaha. Well, because I stay with my parents and they have been staying in the same house for the past 10 years so imagine how much 'rubbish' would have accumulated LOL...So, I just took whatever not in use and brought it to a better place *laughs* This really saved us a lot of money. And I would also like to thank all those who have sponsored me household items one way or another. Very helpful for a new couple like us.
Hence, the same time, I was spring cleaning my own room.
Haha the amount of press kits received over the years. Only part of it >.<
And empty bottles that I have LOL
Sorry was unable to bring all of you to my new place otherwise my husband will kill me *laughs*
10. CLEANING
After all that, it's time for the big cleaning before the move in. I have cleaned my house once before moving in some furnitures, then cleaned it again after doing some touch up work, then cleaned again after more furnitures came in and I kept cleaning my house but it's still dusty hahaha...Again, I had help. I hired a service company from Kaodim.com. I cleaned together with the 2 hired maids in the first round for 4 hours. 3 of us were dead tired. Luckily I helped, otherwise I don't think they were able to finish it because it was really dirty by the time all the renovation works finished. But at least now, after a few rounds of cleaning, it's finally better and I can finally see my dream house coming true and put together hehe
Here's the BEFORE look. So it originally looked like this when we got the keys to the house.
AFTER!
Love the hearts design on the gate hehe
BEFORE
We built new side walls.
Mid work.
AFTER
New tiles.
Built a new storeroom under the staircase.
Mid work.
AFTER.
Built new kitchen table top.
Mid work.
Finishing touches.
New basins.
Kitchen cabinets in progress.
AFTER! Love it =)
Broke the walls adjoining two bathroom upstairs.
To make one long master bathroom.
AFTER.
Because we demolished two bathrooms, we made a new bathroom in the other room.
Built a bathroom from scratch.
It was hardwork building a new bathroom due to the pipings but it came true as well!
Transformed one of the room upstairs to our very own walk in wardrobe =)
This is my dream come true =))
Our master bedroom.
AFTER.
Dressing tables =)
Living Hall -BEFORE-
AFTER.
Our house colour theme is earthy tones.
Dining hall.
Since we wanted more space, we bought the dining table from Ikea which is foldable. So if there are more people, it can open up and if not in use, it can be super small to save space. We also bought an alkaline water filter which is very convenient. No longer need to boil drinking water at home haha
At the same time, we were also renovating another house which just got vacant possession from the Developer to be rented out. I think that's where all our time went haha and another morale of the story: Don't renovate 2 houses and plan a wedding at the same time LOL
Luckily this house only had minor renovations to be done.
It was new and nice already so luckily not much to do but still...furnishing 2 houses was a real toll on both of us haha...not only emotionally but also financially.
We did grills...
...and had to install more air conds and heaters etc. And since we changed all our lightings in our marriage house to LED lights, all the older lights were put into this new house. Cost effective huh =)
All of these while in the midst of planning a wedding, packing my stuffs from my current house to shift, learning how to cook to be a good wife, working a few jobs at the same time, blogging, attending events, working out to keep fit...now I feel tired already haha...But you don't know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice!
Just need to put the cotton on top and one pump is enough.
